PhysX – Defying the Laws of Tradition

We are Building it Bigger
Games typically involve scenes of your character moving towards an objective set against a background. Throw in some objects to mix things up a bit and render the lot, according to the capabilities of your hardware. Due to the limited capabilities of commercially available hardware and the extraordinarily time consuming task of programming object properties into games, this is not representative of the real world. We see something that mimics what happens in the real world. If corners weren’t cut, we wouldn’t have the processing power to be able to display the graphics. In real-time motion, anyway.

Not any more.

We were brought face to face with a quantum leap in object-dependant gaming action. Crates exploded everywhere around us, splintering into thousands of pieces each, rebounding and interacting with the other crates that were doing the same thing. It all served to create one of the most stunning and believable game experiences that we have ever played.

The Cell Factor demo is based on an upcoming game of the same name by Artificial Studios. It has been developed as a demonstration of the capabilities of Ageia’s Physics Processing Unit (PPU) first, and a game second. According to Artificial’s website, they were satisfied with the game engine but would have preferred to have used the new Unreal 3 engine, which will power Unreal Tournament 2007 and support the PhysX card.

For now they are using their own Reality Engine (since bought by Epic Games,) and if they are implying that other game engines will work better with the PhysX card, they are setting the bar very high for other developers. In total, from all developers that have announced support for Ageia, there are 6 games prepared for release sometime very soon and 18 slated for some time in the immediate future.

Cell Factor has been designed as a technical demo for the PhysX card first and a game second. It is not surprising that it is visually spectacular, especially when contrasted to the implementations of dedicated PPU technology in games such as Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. The advances physics in the new Ghost Recon are certainly there; just nowhere near as pronounced as the technical demo, which has been designed to wring all the eye candy out of the new PPU. It was clearly doing its job, but the graphics cards were really being stressed.

The Cell Factor demonstrations should serve to get developers thinking about new ways of implementing extra possibilities and realism into their games. Although the technology hasn't been fully implemented yet, it is now commercially available and we should expect to see it being used to greater effect in the future. Which is why the card serves as a landmark, not as a must have piece of technology.

Whether it sinks or swims will be a decision in the hands of many aspects of the software industry. PPU technology may have been developed for adding realism to games, and it does that quite well and will only become more impressive with time, but there are other potential applications such as CAD and 3D modeling that may benefit from physics acceleration, should future versions be coded to use the technology.

cont.

The Atomic PhysX videos

Direct from the Atomic labs, showing off the capabilities of the Ageia PhysX card with commentary by David Field and Craig Simms.

Small
WMV 18.75Mb

Large
Ogg Vorbis 56.46Mb